Geraldine Monk reads poems from a new series ‘They who saw the deep’ at a performance last year. These poems are written after the shipping news and include themes of and references to migration, sea travel, displacement, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the cooking of roast dinners. Four of these poems appear in our Winter 2015 issue.

Before I was mortal, I was haloed
in feathers, my trinity of familiars;
whose birdsong was legend, serenading
the dead from their dreams, lullabying
the living to torpor. For the sake
of this world and him, I swallowed
my guardians, let them nest in my belly
and take turns in my throat. The sparrow
became my repartee, my grappling chatter
that flutters away the dead air. The mockingbird
staked claim as my mimicking tongue, parodying
the world as it heard it, to be droll,
to belong. And the thrush was poetry,
my childsong, my verse-voice, the brittle
thread to my blueprint life.

For the sake of my world and him,
I crowded my belly with children,
each deafened in utero by the never-ending
twittering. My birds heckled my sons
for mirroring the man that caged
them within this ungenerous flesh.
My unborn tried walling their ears,
even taking their leave before
they were finished. My pets pecked
and fought over what remained.
But now that a girl is unfurling,
the facsimile of me, their familiar,
they coo and brood over her, sing her
to flower, while laying eggs of their own
under her unspeakable tongue.

Ellen Cranitch’s poems are published by Carcanet in the Oxford Poets series. Her work has appeared in a range of magazines including Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review and Ambit and won numerous prizes.